Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Dragons

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

Alex Schmidt, Katie Goldin, and Jason Pargin explore why dragons are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Dragons. Known for being fiery. Famous for being beastly. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why dragons are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alec Schmidt, and I'm very much not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie, hey. Howdy. Howdy. And we are also joined by a wonderful guest, returning guest of the show. His new novel is called Zoe is Too Drunk for This Dystopia. It is out tomorrow, and we're so glad to be joined by Jason Pargin. Jason, how you doing?

So tomorrow is Halloween. We're recording this in the past because of course they need time to edit out all of my swears. But yeah, that's for everyone out there. It's Halloween. You know, this is not just my favorite holiday. It's really the only day that I think of as a holiday anymore. All of the rest of it is just a hassle, but Halloween is pure holiday. So I am glad, I am happy for all of you living in my future and your present. Wow, it's a time travel episode already. Fantastic. That wild element, I think it fits this wonderful topic we have today. Thank you to Pakoda for suggesting it on the Discord. Also, other listeners, Durzo, Donna, Nickname, XKerax, Solosin42. Many people excited about this.

And we always start with our relationship to the topic or opinion of it. Maybe, Jason, you go first. What is your relationship to or opinion of dragons? There is a fact that I had heard many, many years ago, which is that every culture on earth has some form of a dragon myth. Usually some sort of a flying giant scaly serpent of some kind. But this is among cultures who never contacted each other. They each independently came up with dragons. So I did a TikTok because I am now primarily a TikToker in my day job somehow that went hugely viral. It's like 10 million views or something speculating about a particular theory we're going to get into about why every culture invented dragons simultaneously and separately, because it really gets into the

base of how cultures form and how myths form and how myths bind us together. Exactly. I love that video. And I think it's part of why folks might have suggested this. Pakoda said they're curious about various cultures, different version of dragons. And so either parallel thinking of it or inspired by it, I think that's where it's coming from. And also, Katie, how do you feel about dragons, huh? What do you think of them? I like them. They're cool. They breathe fire.

The thing is, I get frustrated by dragon anatomy because I get confused when it's a four-legged dragon with wings because in nature nature generally the wings the wings is the arms you don't got arms and wings you either got arms or you got wings you see it in birds you see it in mammals uh bird wings are sort of uh modified forearms. Bat wings are modified forearms and hands. The only thing that kind of don't use forelimbs as wings are insects whose wings are modified gills generally. So to me, a dragon is more in the dinosaur family, so it should follow bird rules. And bird rules is its forearms should be the wings.

It can still have claws on the wings, like archaic birds and early gliding dinosaurs, but having the forelegs and the wings, gotta be honest, it messes with me. It freaks my bean. the wings gotta be honest it messes with me it it freaks my bean i i feel like this is raising a potential amazing piece of canon which is that dragons are some kind of apex bug that would be the i've never heard that ever in any fiction anything like if that's how insects finally take over the world by building up to dragons great giant bugs or that their wings are modified lungs which would be spooky yeah also just i'm not not trying to put this on katie or to introduce a new burden into her life but who of you out there listeners would listen to a weekly show in which Katie criticizes fictional creature design,

like watches a movie like Avatar, where they tried so hard to create like new alien aquatic life, but they've all tried to make it different from Earth life where it's like, well, this whale has six eyes and where she deconstructs like why that doesn't make sense. Why in this environment would a whale need additional eyes? What would the additional eyes be for? Animals that have more than two eyes, they are a specific construct. And here's why. And breaking down why these creatures don't make sense.

Why the xenomorphs from Alien or whatever. Why it doesn't make sense for the predator to have mandibles. Yeah. Yeah, I would love to just ruin things for people and say like, stop liking movies. None of them are accurate. I hate fun. Although I got to say, I do love the alien, the xenomorphs from aliens. Cause that little tiny alien that pops out of their jaw. There's like, there are fish, eel type fish, where they have a second set of jaws that pop out of their mouths, like a, called the pharyngeal jaws. So A plus to the alien's design. I buy it. I totally get it. I'm on board.

Ah, the alien franchise is about to get the Katie bump. How about that? Lucky them. And as we said, we have this wonderful theory that Jason humongously popularly TikTok'd about so wonderfully. And we're going to do that first, then get into stats and numbers later. And so this theory, takeaway number one. takeaway number one. One theory about the origin of dragons is that they're a combination of predatory animals feared by primates. Like the dragon lore, it might combine fears about large reptiles and predatory jungle cats and birds of prey, as well as anything else that terrified an early community of humans or our primate ancestors before that. I mean, that's very interesting because, you know, back when we were small enough and grabbable enough,

a raptor, a predatory bird, would certainly be a danger. And these small monkey species like vervets will issue alarm calls and different alarm calls for birds versus like a leopard versus a snake. So they do distinguish what these predators are and they are indeed afraid of them. And I don't know if it's like the monkeys have imagined the dragons, although now I'm thinking of monkey imagined dragons. the dragons, although now I'm thinking of monkey imagined dragons, but it could be that we have, we are particularly keyed into these predators and then to a certain extent, enjoy thinking about them and obsessing over them. Yeah. And the way I put it in my video, because I'm fascinated by this theory, which by the way, it's just a theory. It's kind of impossible to know because our dragon myths, as we're going to discuss, go back before we have records for where they started. We don't know the name of the guy who came up with it.

But the idea that the human brain is a dragon-creating machine, that no matter where you put it, that if you put a bunch of babies on an island somewhere and come back a thousand years later, they will have dragon myths because we are descended from animals who, if you were not instinctively afraid of snakes, you would not live long enough to pass on your offspring. That there are certain fears that you, even if you never encountered a snake in real life, if you hear that sound, if you see it, there's certain just images and noises that trigger something that cause, you know, goosebumps to go up your spine. For example, every culture has a myth about ghosts or zombies or the dead rising from the grave. But there, to me, that's no mystery. Of course, everyone fears the dead. Of course, everyone has had a

dream of someone who has recently died because you're thinking about them and then woke up and thought, oh, I was visited by my dead father in the night. So to me, that's very obvious how everyone would have a ghost myth or a zombie myth. I think it's less obvious how everyone would have some form of dragon. But I love this idea that it starts with a primal fear of certain types of creatures. And then it's like, well, super smart and like the coolest thing in the world. So now people will airbrush this thing on the side of their van. And it's like, you know, everyone loves dragons. And yeah, this theory that we've been talking about, one person theorizing it is University of Central Florida anthropology professor David Jones.

Florida anthropology professor David Jones, in a book in 2000 called An Instinct for Dragons, he said that this might date back to when we were primates, similar to a current modern species of monkey. That monkey species Katie was talking about. Vervets. That monkey, it's common across sub-Saharan Africa, and people have observed it making one alarm call for leopards, which means you leap for the treetops, another alarm call for eagles and other birds of prey, which means duck to low branches, and a third alarm call for snakes, which means they jump. And so that's really skillful categorization of threats. And it might have led to not just categorizing the threats, but they might have pulled from those three sources to make one monster, the dragon, over the long haul of starting as primates and becoming human primates.

alarm calls. They actually will respond not just to their own species alarm calls, but the alarm calls of other species of monkeys and of other animals, because they learn the alarm calls that other denizens of the forest make, and then will respond as if it's their own, because they want to know these signals, and they have their own signal. But then if they hear another signal that they associate with the threat as well, they will learn that. So you already have these species that are very intelligent and able to make these connections. And that ability to kind of like start making different connections to things that serve these little monkeys so well, you know, has developed into a much more complex system in humans. And we love making and mixing things. We love making connections. Dragons, of course, are kind of the big one, but there are all sorts of mythological creatures

that are just like combinations of stuff. Like you slap a snake head onto a chicken body and it's a basilisk or something. You know, it's like we love combining things. We put a human body on a horse. You know, we see ourselves as somewhat similar maybe to some predators. And then so like maybe what if a human turned into a wolf, like a werewolf? Because, you know, we're predators, they're predators. There's some similarity, but they're scary and they scare us. So like a human becoming a, you know, we're predators, they're predators. There's some similarity,

but they're scary and they scare us. So like a human becoming a wolf is a scary thing. So it's, it's really interesting to me, our ability to mix and match concepts and how that is both a very important survival technique in both humans and early primates, but it's also really fun. And we get so much culture and enjoyment from it. Well, and I think it also gets back to what you said about how this creature doesn't make sense as something that would actually would have evolved in its environment. To me, that's what points it toward that it's a mashup of various creatures, because I think the idea is that they had these different calls, different ways to

respond to different predators, because how you react if a bird of prey is coming after you is totally different to how you react if it's a leopard is coming after you. So the idea of, what if there's a creature that could do all that? What if there was something that was as strong and predatory as a leopard, but it could fly, you know, and it was as crafty and sly as a snake, you know, and whatever. So it's like now you can't escape it. So I think when you're trying to come up with scary horror ideas, a lot of it's just that, because it's like, well, spiders are already scary because their bite can possibly poison you or whatever. But it's like, yeah, but what if it was giant? Then you couldn't step on it. Like the one thing that makes you not afraid of spiders, that they're tiny and you can step on

them. Like, yeah, but what if it was huge? Yeah. And all that is a lot of why we have so many different dragon traditions in the world. And we won't cover all of them on this episode because there's just too many, but I especially like the combination in this theory where it's snakes and big cats and birds, because it's particularly relevant to dragons that are not from Europe. One source this week is the book A Little History of Dragons by nonfiction writer Joyce Hargreaves. She says, many cultures outside Europe represent dragons with feathers. Some Australian First Nations peoples have stories about a feathered rainbow serpent who moved between waterholes while creating the sky.

The people of the Triple Alliance, aka the Aztecs, they celebrated a key god called Quetzalcoatl, who is often depicted feathered, not just a winged serpent, but also feathered. The Cato people of modern Southern California, according to ethnographer E.W. Gifford, they have a story of an earth dragon who rose to create the world. And that's not this harsh, scaly European look. It's a being that has such a lush exterior that the gods use the earth dragon as a land for cultivating plants. This is a huge variation and difference from just the reptile version. And it's probably partly because we combined a lot of animals. A lot of the first dragon lore was a serpent-shaped creature. It aligns with just how

we feel about snakes right now, today. No legs, no wings. One of the early examples is a Babylonian creation story featuring Tiamat, and Tiamat was a female water dragon of saltwater and chaos and was a monster that fought the gods and created the gods. And then also one of the most positive versions is the lore in ancient China. The Smithsonian says ritual Chinese dragon dances date back more than 2,000 years, people carrying and dancing with a single lengthy dragon puppet. And today that's mostly entertainment, but early on it was probably a way of praying for good rainfall. They would even try to build the dragons with an odd number of joints for positive numerology reasons. And so those dragons, they might have still developed from predator fears.

That helps create stories where these water dragons are fearsome and powerful and large. Then also, they probably also develop from stories of rain gods. And so they're also coming from this being and character that is positive and here to help us water our crops. And, you know, all of that is very snake-driven. And we even have a lot of European and, for example, English language words where the words for dragons match words for snakes. Quoting Joyce Hargreaves, the words dracon and draco were both used throughout the Greek and Roman empires to

describe a large snake. And the word dragon is derived from both of those names. Also, Dracula, the vampire. In Romanian, Dracula, it means son of the dragon, which was Vlad the Impaler's nickname because his father being the dragon Dracul, as they would call him. And so that's where the fictional vampire got his name. Dracula is derived from the word dragon. Yeah, it's just a fun word for everything at this point. It's snakes, it's dragons, it's vampires. Cool.

We just mash all things together all the time as people. We love connections. We just want to do that all the time. I mean, it's interesting with like the mysticism of snakes and the connection to sort of unholy, dangerous, scary monsters like Dracula. Because, yes, birds and other predators were certainly scary to us when we were vulnerable to them. But snakes are, you know, I mean, certainly to people at the time. And Jason, you and I have talked about this a little bit on Creature Feature, but the impact of snake venom and those that comes out of those terrible looking fangs is so weird. And Jason, I think you described it as like it's as if this snake is like cursing you

because now you're bleeding out of your gums and having weird things happening to your body and potentially dying. Yeah, because it's not a snake venom for people that didn't know. It's not always just you get a red swelling in your arm and then it stops your heart. You can get truly, truly weird stuff and paralysis and just bizarre symptoms all over your body that can persist for months or years. It is very easy to understand why snakes got mythologized into magical creatures. And of course, in the Christian Bible, we'll get to this later, but it's not just that Satan is a snake in some forms, but they're prevalent as a symbol of some sort of evil

or whatever. But I can easily see ancient people, you know, the way snakes can sneak around and hide and they're difficult to see. And you pull up, you know, a straw mat in your hut and there's a snake hiding under there, projecting intentionality on that. And this thing is down there trying to curse me, rather than it was just looking for shade. Like, you know, this is how we think. We think of things as evil. Yeah, it wasn't just trying to wiggle. It's up to something.

I like that there's so many natural world origin points for this dragon lore and situation. Like it could just be a lot of people driven by fear of snakes. lot of people driven by fear of snakes. It could be this theory we're talking about where the predators for primates of snakes and big birds and big cats are all being combined. Then there's also another theory about prehistoric bones being a big driving force here. According to the American Museum of Natural History, some discoveries of dinosaur bones by various people at various times were presumed to be dragon bone specimens. And this especially happened with skulls, even if the skulls are not from reptilian dinosaurs. There's an Australian paleontologist named Othenio Abel, who noted that the skulls of Ice Age cave bears are about 50% larger than a grizzly bear skull,

and just the bones match European-style dragon heads in a lot of art. And we also might have thought prehistoric giraffe bones or dragons. The New York Times says that a huge proto-giraffe, scientific name Savetherium giganteum, has a pointed three-foot-long skull, which is very dragon. And another proto-giraffe called Girafficarix has four swept-back horns in addition to the rest of the skull shape. So between the skulls of early giraffes and also the huge long bones, we might have just spun out a lot of ideas from those incomplete finds of old giraffe bones. That might have sparked a lot of dragons. I mean, we're constantly changing how we imagine dinosaurs. Like today, within the last few decades, we are like, actually, maybe they were a little chubbier or maybe they had feathers.

So imagine not having all the scientific tools we have now. You look at it and you're like, that's a monster. And I have no way of knowing what it is, except it looks like it has claws and horns and probably breathes fire or something terrible. This was actually on that TikTok. The very, very top comment was, I think, a woman promoting her OnlyFans page. But the second comment below that was somebody saying, isn't dragons just people finding old dinosaur fossils and not knowing what a dinosaur was? And the answer to the guy who wrote the book above was that you find dragon myths even in parts of the world that aren't good for preserving dinosaur fossils, where they wouldn't necessarily have found, or in this case, any extinct big animal where you find bones that seem to belong to

something bigger than what you have now. Like, obviously, if you have elephants present day and you find elephant bones, you know that's an elephant. But there are some parts of the world where they didn't necessarily find giant bones, but they still have a dragon myth. didn't necessarily find giant bones, but they still have a dragon myth. These are not competing theories. Most myths are cobbled together from various evidence. So when someone finds a giant bone, if you have an existing dragon myth or vice versa, it just supports the thing. And every myth, like UFO myths, go back to a real thing. People saw something, you know, they saw a light, they saw an aircraft, they saw a meteor, like there is a real thing. And then every time they see it, it just adds to the mythology that they built up from whatever primal fears people have

of invasion or whatever creates, you know, alien, alien mythology. you know, alien, alien mythology. Right. Like the bones you find might give a new shape to this cultural idea you already have. You would find something like some kind of horn and you're like, hey, that looks like a unicorn horn. Therefore, unicorns exist. And also I'm going to smoke that horn so that i can be virile and healthy and then any kind of a myth you know once it gets into the realm of capitalism like there's somebody that could be

that can make money selling an artifact from this creature now you have a whole other motivation to promote this thing as magical and virile so like that actually changes the myth because you're now trying to sell something and that's not something that just came along recently like i think you go back far enough like any region that's got a version of the loch ness monster like at some point it became a tourist attraction and so the people making money from the tourists uh suddenly you're you're manifesting all sorts of new sightings and aspects of this creature because you're just trying to sell T-shirts. I like that we sort of completed this takeaway. And also what we're talking about is a lot of the rest of the show because the whole topic of dragons is how did we make this up?

We're not talking about a thing that exists. We're talking about a concept that has loomed large in people's minds all over the world in all sorts of different ways. So let's keep exploring that. Where did dragons come from? How did we imagine them? And to get into that, let's dive into a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics in a segment called numbers. Here are the numbers. First stats, then the numbers. Numbers. Here are the numbers.

First stats, then the numbers. I recognize that from the popular group Ponder Dragons. And that name was submitted by Chris on the Discord. Thank you, Chris. Dragons. And that name was submitted by Chris on the Discord. Thank you, Chris. There's a new name for this segment every week. Please make a Massillion Wacking Bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to sifpod at gmail.com. And the

first number this week is about 6,000 years ago. About 6,000 years ago is the age of one of the earliest human representations of a dragon that we still have, that's still in one piece. It's a cylinder seal from the Mesopotamian River Valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates. It depicts a goddess called Bao with a tree of life, and behind her there's a serpent dragon representing her life-giving powers.

And also 6,000 years ago is definitely not the age of dragon lore. That's just the oldest thing we have a concrete example of. We'll probably never know, as Jason was saying, like who invented this, who came up with it first. I think people really struggle with the idea that there may be myths that predate our ability to verbalize them even. Like these are ideas that were around before we knew how to talk with each other about ideas. I think that's something that's very hard for people to understand, but it almost definitely has to be true because now, you know, you think if it doesn't exist in a book, then anything prior to that kind of doesn't count. But the idea of universal writing and reading as a way to transmit and record ideas is very recent. Yeah, we have so many different ways

of telling these stories. And as soon as there are written records we still have, they get really weird. Like if people heard the recent episode about the name Alex, which I am surprised has been so relevant to so many other topics. On that, we talked about a story called the Alexander Romance, which was an extremely fictional and made up and superhero-y version of the life of Alexander the Great. We will have digital resources from the University of Iowa for uploads and write-ups about medieval versions of this story, because there's a key part that we talked about where an Egyptian pharaoh turns himself into a snake to seduce Alexander's mother and secretly be Alexander's father. But in a lot of

old translations, the word snake and the word dragon were totally interchangeable. So I'm very excited to link funny, dumb pictures of a dragon romancing a lady and tricking her, it's bad. But it's a really weird way to track not just the badness of medieval art, but also medieval representations of this beast that is just made up. These images are not safe for work. They both look so bored in this etching. You're both right. Their expressions are pure boredom. Like, eh, you're a dragon, and I've got my boobs out, and I guess we're going to have sex. Whatever, man. They both know that it's over, and they just won't admit it to themselves. They're both just

together because of inertia. They date us, don't want to break it off, but they know that it's over and they just won't admit it to themselves. They're both just together because of inertia. They just don't want to break it off, but they know that there's no more spark there. They're just a dragon and a woman going through the motions of having dragon and lady intimate relations. And we talked a little earlier about how dragon myths have expanded a lot. There's intelligent ones, there's gold hoarding ones. And there's a few loose theories about how we got there in our storytelling. One is that there are real intelligent animals like corvids and raccoons that seek out and gather shiny items. And so maybe we gave dragons that behavior. There is also a storytelling trope of treasure just being in caves.

And so we might have crossed that over with lore about dragons like in caves, because especially a lot of the snake-based dragons do that snaky thing of wanting to be in caves and crevices and stuff. And then there's also a theory that the landmark work of early literature called Beowulf, that describes an intelligent dragon hoarding gold. And maybe just that creative author kind of coined a lot of this. And then that was influential. The thing with corvids and birds picking out shiny objects, they'll actually go after a lot of things, including shiny things. But I don't think there's evidence they specifically target shiny stuff.

The reason we have that concept is that we humans specifically look out for shiny stuff. And so we notice it when a bird has a shiny thing. And so from our perspective, and this is not to refute your point, because it was the concept that we would think that birds go after shiny things. That may have been the origin of this myth, but we are kind of projecting our own myopic focus on shiny stuff onto these birds. Good for us. shiny stuff onto these birds. Good for us. I love the idea that,

because you mentioned that the other examples, raccoons like to hoard little objects they find. I love the idea that dragons are a combination of raptors and snakes and leopards and also raccoons because they like to steal our little trash from our house and play with it. It's like, yes, they have the raccoon's desire for our little things from our house. Just a dragon washing its hands in a stream so it can feel stuff more accurately. Oh, great. Yeah.

Always trying to wash the damsel in the streams before eating it. So cute. before eating it. So cute. Speaking of more animal biology, the next number here is 369. The number 369, that is an amount of animal species that a group of Chinese scholars in ancient China listed as having scales.

They were trying to write basically a straightforward biology text recounting all the scaled animals in the world. And their list of 369 animals included dragons, along with snakes, along with real reptiles. There was also a lot more numerological stuff about the dragons having 117 scales specifically. Each of them has 117 scales. 81 of the scales were masculine, 36 of the scales were feminine, just all sorts of numerology and extraordinarily specific observation of the exteriors of dragons, which again are not existing animals in the world. What was the difference between feminine and masculine scales? Some were pink and some had flames on the side. Exactly. There's no reason for any of that.

Some asked for directions and the others didn't. And then this mindset, it also crossed over into early medical research there. In the 400s AD, a medical scholar named Lei Ziao wrote up a recipe for using dragon bones to make medicine to strengthen the human kidney. He said, quote, first cook odorous plants, bathe the bones twice in hot water, pound them to powder and put this in bags of gauze. Take a couple of young swallows and after taking out their intestines and stomach, put the bags in the swallows and hang them over a well. After one night, take the bags out of the swallows, rub the powder and mix it into medicines for strengthening the kidneys, end quote. and mix it into medicines for strengthening the kidneys, end quote. This is something we discussed on our previous episode, that when you go into ancient medicine or spells or like witches' brews, they have these incredibly complex methods for preparing the ingredients because when it inevitably doesn't work, it gives you room to say,

well, you didn't do it right. You have to hang the birds. You have to disembowel the birds and hang them in a full moon over a well on, you know, blah, blah, blah on the 13th of the month. And so because it's so complicated and so difficult to do, if it doesn't work, you can always just put it on the person who brewed the potion. It's like, well, it obviously wasn't a full moon when you hung the birds. That is interesting though, because that's another connection to snakes, because snakes were for a very long time associated with medicine. I mean, obviously, we talk about like snake oil, but even back in ancient Greece, Asclepios was this god of medicine.

Snakes, the rod of Asclepios, you know, the little snake round about it. And we still see it in medical context today. It's because like the snake was associated with healing and medicine because it would like shed its skin and seem to be rejuvenated. So it was this idea that snakes are not just a danger, but they're also this magical creature that can rejuvenate itself. Yeah, and there's no way to like quantify it exactly. But I hope we're expressing how much of early dragon lore across all sorts of cultures all over the world was a snake shaped animal. Yeah, I think people have been really astounded by snakes for all of time, and terrified of them. But also simply saying, this being is kind of

magic, it regenerates, it has no legs and this being is kind of magic. It regenerates. It has no legs and moves. This is the most magical animal on Earth. And I'm going to make some mythology about it. They're truly fascinating little noodles. And yet another extremely specific dragon observation here. The number is 58 BC. The year 58 BC. That's the claimed year of an event documented by Pliny the Elder, a famously wildly wrong Roman empire thinker. Pliny said that in

58 BC, the city of Rome held a public exhibition, like a big show of the spine of a sea serpent. And he said the serpent was killed by Perseus. He said explicitly 58 BC, there was a big Roman show of the spine of a sea dragon. A lot of caveats there. Perseus is mythological. He is the character who killed the Medusa and wrote a Pegasus. Also, Pliny lived about 100 years after 58 BC. He did not witness this event. And if people have heard, especially the podcast Sawbones, which is an awesome podcast about medical history and on MaxFun, Pliny the Elder, they've done whole episodes just about how wrong he is

about all sorts of things. They didn't say he was Pliny the Correct. They just said he was Pliny the Elder. He was just old. That's all. Pliny the Elder, who shares a lot of Facebook memes. And then he also made pretty ridiculous excuses for the lack of dragons around him because he's claiming a hundred years ago, but really that means not that long ago,

people were pulling sea dragons out of the Mediterranean and killing them. And he said, oh, well, we're not seeing dragons here because they simply live too far away. They live in India. And then he claimed that Indian dragons were so big they could pick up elephants and drop them out of trees. Modern scholars think Pliny was over-exaggerating real stories about predatory tree snakes in the Indian subcontinent. So really, really particular and specific, like on this day in this Roman square, we had the body of a sea dragon. And also there's no way to see a dragon now, don't worry about it. That specificity is totally a thing like that we saw with the counting the number of scales on the

dragon. If you're going to lie about dragons, go for extreme specificity. Like this dragon was feet and 13 inches long. And it's, you know, had 102 scales and it had a little bit of broccoli stuck between its teeth. Because the more details you throw into a story, the more it sounds like you're definitely, definitely telling the truth. That is a tangent that I could talk about for the next three hours, because if you go to any successful cult or anything, belief system like that, you will find they have a vast treasure trove of their own terminology. And like in Scientology, they love acronyms and they have millions of these acronyms you need to memorize. of these acronyms you need to memorize. And part of that is because if you are a member and you have devoted hundreds and hundreds of hours to memorizing all of this lore and reading all 4,000 pages of their holy book and memorizing all this terminology, there is a sunk cost thing that comes in. Because surely this can't turn out to be fake because these details occupy 80% of my brain now. The idea that all of these fine, ultra-fine details that I have memorized the exact

year that L. Ron Hubbard took on superpowers and went to Mars with his teleportation powers, like that I've memorized all of this stuff word for word, that can't all have been for nothing. all of this stuff word for word that can't all have been for nothing. So if you want a myth to persist, the more fine details you pile onto it, the better. It's the opposite of what you would expect. It needs to be simple in the broad strokes, but upon examination, it needs to be full of tiny, tiny details that people can obsess over. That's what makes mythology survive. It's also interesting because it is a misconception about human memory where it's, well, the more detailed I am in describing this thing, the more likely it is that I was actually there and I remember it. But our memory

is actually not super detailed, pretty fuzzy. Like, you know, like you saw a dragon, what color was its eyes? It's like, I don't remember because I was so shocked to see a dragon. I couldn't tell you what color its eyes were. That would be perhaps more realistic. But if you're, but our ability to invent stories, like we can get into enormous details when we're inventing things. But someone who's lying about a dragon or wants to convince you, they're thinking like, well, if I was actually there, what are all the things I would see? And I should describe those, like putting myself in that. But that's just, that's not really how memory works. Memory is like, I don't know, there's this like big lizard thing and I was

scared and I peed my pants and then I tripped over and my pants fell down. And I really don't remember what it looked like or what it sounded like. I just remember peeing everywhere because I was so terrified. Yeah. And Pliny also is not trusted by modern scholars, but he was believed and translated for nearly 2,000 years, all the way to relatively recent times, influenced a lot of specifically scientific-minded people. And the end result of all these ancient dragon accounts and their super specificity informs our other two big takeaways this week. Before we get into that, we're going to take a quick break and then come back with a gross dragon reproduction theory and rad dragons from space. Folks, as you know, this show is brought to you by members of Maximum Fun. They are the pillar that holds up the entire show.

They're the only reason it is a show. Go to MaximumFun.org slash join to become one of those people and get a bunch of stuff in return too. On top of that, I've been finding partners who make sense that make something I actually like and think is awesome. So support also comes from A Queer History of Aerospace. That's a new audio miniseries from the Museum of Flight, premiering October 24th. I don't know if you know the Museum of Flight. It's in Seattle, Washington. It is the largest private non-profit air and space museum in the world. Very legit place. And their new show, A Queer History of Aerospace, explores the ways the LGBTQ plus community has shaped aviation and shaped space exploration and the ways that that industry

has impacted this community as well. If you like CifPod, especially if you've heard a lot of our bonus shows, we are often talking about NASA. There is way more to it than Apollo 11 and Apollo 13. So that's a gap worth filling. And then we super should take a look at the LGBTQ plus people who either got erased from that story or got told in that story but had that part of themselves left out or kind of soft peddled. Listen at museumofflight.org slash podcast or search The Flight Deck on your favorite podcatcher. New episode every Tuesday beginning October 24th. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess.

This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year.

Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. Folks, we are back with those other dragon takeaways because takeaway number two. Thousands of years of scientifically minded people have attempted to document dragons, and this led to a European theory

that dragons come from strangely mixed animal semen. Huh, yeah. That is from the 1600s AD. So about 400 years ago, some Europeans believed they had scientifically solved and explained how dragons happen. And the explanation was that animal semen combined strangely. Yeah, man, you just get a bit of semen, you shake it up in a cocktail shaker and out comes

a dragon or a dog chicken or a mongoose walnut. Who knows? I do like the idea that somebody is a cool mixologist shaking that metal shaker for a long, long time. But then they open and it's just an egg somehow. That's a fun visual to me. Would you like your snake and bird semen shaken or stirred? shaken or stirred. Because we've been talking a lot about, you know, various motivations there could be for inventing dragon stories. It could be this just committing hard to a mythology.

It could be people simply inventing canon for fun. That's a whole other way people get way into a canon. And then there's also fraud out there. The New York Times says the 1500s were a particularly big time for European dragon fraud. There was an Italian mathematician said he saw dragon babies at a show in Paris in the year 1557. It was probably a carnival type show where somebody took snakes and sewed bat wings onto the snake bodies. Yeah, and lots of kind of fake cryptid stuff happens to this day. By the way, check out the podcast Big Feats, where our buddy Jason Pargin and our buddies Sean Baby and Robert Brockway watch guys in the Appalachians just invent cryptid stuff all day.

It's one of the reasons that for so long we thought the platypus was a hoax, because people kept doing weird taxidermy. And then when it's like, here's a mammal that has a bill and lays eggs, everyone's like, seen that one already. Boo. Not that this is a behavior that has gone away in recent years, but this is one of the fascinating things about us as a species. Because the human mind, like, obviously we need to learn information that is real to survive. We need to know which plants are poison. We need to know which areas are too dangerous to go into, but also our minds seek novelty. We want new things. That's what, that's

what prompts us to go venturing out into the dark forest because it's prompt us to go, hey, there may be really good fishing in this different river. But to find it, there has to be something in your mind that's like, I'm bored of fishing here. I'm going to go venture out. I'm going to go take the risk. But the problem is when it comes to science and trying to define what actually is real, there's always this competition between the scientists who are actually trying to filter things down to what is real. And there's the people out there who realize they can sell souvenirs by just making a fake creature and make more money than if it was real because people want something new and exciting and cool that's different from the boring world we have. So there's all those fraud, excitement, other reasons to invent dragons, but there's also many generations of earnest and hardworking scientists attempting to document and record

and observe dragons. And in Europe, one reason for that was the work of Pliny the Elder stays in print, gets translated into every major European language. Another reason is the Christian Bible, partly because there might have been references to snakes, partly it might have been inventions. The King James translation of the Bible refers to dragons a few times in the Old Testament, also in the Book of Revelation at the end of the New Testament. In the Old Testament, the books of Ezekiel and Psalms both describe dragons as things in large bodies of water, which fits all sorts of dragon lore all over the world. The Book of Isaiah predicts dragons inhabiting an abandoned palace after the palace is overgrown with nettles and brambles, which is very snake lore. There's

also a Leviathan monster that swallows the character Job in the Book of Job. And some translations presented the Leviathan as a dragon. So a lot of especially medieval Christians were primed to accept dragons as real because their main religious text kept saying they're real. You can see where people got there. I'm surprised by how much religious iconography there is of St. George and the dragon. That always just throws me for a loop that this is religious stuff. Like for me, I put like dragon and the like, this is not, this is not Bible stuff. This has nothing to do with Jesus. not Bible stuff. This has nothing to do with Jesus. But like St. George and the dragon, I assume St. George did not really exist. Obviously, the dragon didn't. But this guy was kind of featured like he was a real saint because he killed this dragon.

One of my sources talked about St. George and said that that might have been a real person in what's now modern Turkey. But if they were real, they almost definitely killed a snake. Yeah. It's just like a guy killed a snake in Turkey is, I guess, not exciting enough for people saying we need a patron saint of England. Hmm. Let's say it was a knight in shining armor killing a huge mythical beast. That's cooler. I mean, it worked for Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, but maybe not a person. On the versions of the Bible that I've always read, wherever it has the word dragon, there's always an asterisk.

And then the footnote is like, or serpent. It's clear that in the translations, they're using it interchangeably. So in some cuts of the Bible, in the book of Daniel, Daniel tricks and kills a dragon by feeding us some kind of poison or something.

But in the footnotes is like, or babe and a snake. Right. Is this an incident with the snake they're talking about? Is this a legend about a snake? Is this a legend about a dragon? It is extremely difficult to separate it. People wanted to keep telling dragon stories. It seems to be something that really influenced science, especially in medieval and early modern Europe, that eventually conflicted with the lack of observable dragons. And in particular, Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist in the 1700s,

just started going around debunking dragon claims and fighting with people about it. This created a very interesting to me combination of mindsets. It's not just a history of people who are scientific and don't believe in dragons versus people who are not scientific and do believe in dragons. You had a ton of people who were pro-science and then tried to apply scientific principles to dragons and justify them. And that resulted in a wild theory, because there was a broader 1600s theory called the spermatic principle. And this gets back to the start of the takeaway here, because the spermatic principle claimed that across all animal reproduction, the sperm is the full origin of a new animal. The sperm is where all the characteristics come from. And then the egg is just food like that. The egg is just nutrients for the sperm to individually develop into the entire animal. And that theory is not true. They were wrong in the 1600s.

sometimes. And those are called like when sometimes an animal like those are called omelets. Yes, that's right. They are called the scientific term for them is omelet. No, but sometimes an animal will lay unfertilized eggs for the purpose of feeding them to like other offspring or themselves. And they're called trophic eggs. But yeah, the like, yes, trophic eggs. But yeah, the like, yes, eggs can be food. But yeah, they also contain, obviously genetic information. And but yeah, I love the images that you can look up of this, like spermatic theory of like, of just a tiny human being, like in a little sperm, like, like, it looks like a human in the center of a comet, but it's like he's in a sperm and he goes in. And it's just like, it's peak ancient dude where it's like, we can't let the ladies have any credit for making a person. It's all us.

Right. How would a woman generate life? Meanwhile, pregnancy has happened forever. Right. It's like, don't get too smug, ladies. We know you're the ones giving birth and stuff, but it's all our stuff. Just host the egg buffet for our sperm to eat. That's your only role.

Right. And yeah, this overall spermatic principle becomes a favorite of dragon fans, basically, because the fans of dragon lore, in particular, a scholar called Edward Lewitt, who was director of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. That's more of an art museum now, but in his time, the early 1700s, it was curiosities and science. Edward Lewitt and others made a claim that based on the spermatic principle, you could get a novel and monstrous animal like a dragon when various animal species' semen accidentally combine. Fish and snakes could rise high into the air with evaporation, rain down again, and end up in the high ares of eagles and vultures. In a lucky process called fermentational putrefaction, the mix could produce a winged snake, end quote. That is not how I learned the water cycle, but interesting.

There be dragons in a very normal diagram of how rain works. Yeah. This is like such a good demonstration of how all of this works, though, because once you have the myth and you've decided to believe the myth, all of your science that you learn after that gets reincorporated into the myth. It's like, well, now that we know how sperm works, if you think about it, you could get this, because again, the more you know about animals, the more you know that the dragon as an animal doesn't make any sense. But it's like, yeah, but now that we know how sperm works, if you think about it, you could technically ejaculate onto this thing.

It could evaporate and then land on a fish. And that's how you could get a leopard and a winged snake because if the snake ate the sperm, like you start to – instead of questioning the myth, because as someone who grew up in an evangelical church and where like six-day creation was, it's like all of the science and all the geology we would they would circle back and incorporate it's like well now this doesn't disprove it because technically if they would have all these theories about how the fossil record could be wrong or whatever and all of this stuff you know instead of questioning the original claim it just folds all the new knowledge into it and you kind of wind up retrofitting it onto the myth that's such an interesting perspective on it because because yeah these guys are claiming that fish and snakes and large birds are all loosely spraying their semen everywhere and that is combining through the air. And it's,

they're just trying to stack a little house of cards or fort of various scientific claims into something that finally holds up this idea. And it's tough, but people have been doing it across all sorts of cultures and beliefs. And we learned from that, and we never tried to shoehorn science into our very specific beliefs ever again. Carry it on with that. We have one more takeaway for the main episode. Takeaway number three. Some people have recorded comets and meteors as observations of dragons, in particular one comet before a Norse invasion of England. This is astronomy, especially helping create the fire-breathing concept of a dragon.

I mean, I kind of get it, right? It's this big shiny streak in the sky, and the idea that it's some kind of rock from outer space is just as weird as it being a dragon it's not like oh come on you know like uh let's let's think about something normal like rocks from outer space entering our atmosphere and combusting outer space, which we can't even really document or see. Or, I don't know, maybe some kind of animal that, like, breathes fire. What's more believable? Follow the trail. My mind is trying to retreat to the more understandable ideas of weird animal semen mixing across the atmosphere.

Like, I've just covered that so I can handle that. That comet is a giant semen, and it's going to inseminate the sun. I mean... Prove me wrong. Visually, it makes sense. And with this comet and meteor stuff, key sources here are Oxford medieval literature scholar Carolyn Larrington, and also the American Museum of Natural History and the Deseret News newspaper.

Because, again, there's a lot of 1500s stuff. There's an amazing observation of a comet in the year 1571, recorded by William Fulk, who was an English Puritan theologian. He wrote this about the comet, quote, I suppose it was a flying dragon, whereof we speak, very fearful to look upon as though he had life, because he moveth, whereas he is nothing else but clouds and smoke, end quote. This guy saw a comet, supposed it was a dragon, and also is open to the idea that it's, quote, nothing else but clouds and smoke. Like, that's such an interesting mental flexibility that he could conceive this being interstellar gases and energy, but also from cultural lore and

biblical lore, it might be a dragon. And he and others did a lot of mashing all of these things in their culture into the idea of fire-breathing flying dragons. I feel like that's a pretty big hedge, though, where you can just say like, yeah, I saw a three-headed giraffe, or it could be clouds and smoke. I'm not going to commit to one or the other. See, that's the thing is that for as long as people have been around, we have seen things that occur in the sky as being some kind of a supernatural event or a sign, a sign from the heavens. And especially if your religion kind of puts God in the sky, like you refer to him as heaven, as above us or something like that, anything that happens up there, I think there is a bias toward believing it is some kind of otherworldly or supernatural event versus, well, there must just be, like here on earth,

we have rocks. It's probably just a rock falling from the sky or something like that. Like everything that happens up there needs to be mystical and magical because it all means something the arrangement of the stars mean something you know the arrangement of the stars when you're born means something it all has to have some sort of mythology and meaning to it so suggesting that it's not probably just some gases probably just some gases burning up make it's not, it's probably just some gases, probably just some gases burning up, it's bright for some reason, it's some sort of fire or gas. I can see people not liking that as an explanation. Yeah, it feels boring. It feels like there's less going on in your life. It's also not egocentric because the idea that there's just stuff happening in the universe and it happens regardless of our lives on Earth, is very humbling

and not something I think we really were comfortable at the time thinking about. Yeah, and especially this 1500s observer and the many people like him, that was a centuries-old practice, tying in all these psychological ways of thinking about the sky. And apparently in England in particular, they either coined a lot of this or cemented a lot of this thinking in 793 AD. That year, 793 AD. That is when observers in the kingdom of Northumbria recorded a major flight of dragons in their night sky. This was most likely a comet of some kind. But strangely, this event aligned with a major Viking attack on England, or at least this like proto-England.

Later that same year, 793, Norse ships and troops raided an island monastery called Lindisfarne, which was in Northumbria. This was seen as a terrible sign of doom. It was later seen as the first step of a major Norse invasion and colonization of what's now eastern England. That area became called the Dane Law. So this meteor shower was a very prominent and flexible symbol. It could have been an omen of Norse attack. It could have been dragons. It could have been both. Like it could have been dragons saying, look out for the Norse.

And that made astronomical events even more of a focus for some of the people who would later coin things like fire-breathing dragons in the epic poem Beowulf, which was composed and spoken for the first time around the 700s. What I've always been confused about when you say fire-breathing dragons is that the dragons don't breathe fire. They breathe air like we do, but they expel fire. So like they're fire-exhaling dragons, technically. Like they're fire exhaling dragons, technically. This is the facet of dragons I like the most.

And I know that this is a fairly recent addition to dragon lore, I believe. Like it comes back to this and this is as far as, because unlike everything else a dragon does, this is one behavior that is not observed in any animal anyone would have ever seen with their own two eyes. Like everyone would have seen a snake or knew somebody who had seen a snake. Everybody had seen a bird of prey. Everybody has probably seen a very large animal that was bigger than it should be. So the idea of like, there's a big snake, the panther bat out there, that's, it's just like, well, we've got versions of all those and it's just big it's like that's not that much of a stretch but once you add the fact that it breathes fire it's now doing something that has to be magic yeah i find that really interesting because it's like there's a point where they decided to spice it up to make it a little bit cooler and the idea of this thing breathing fire like that totally changes its capabilities,

its nature, everything. Now it implies that it is some sort of a supernatural, demonic essence. Whereas the way serpents are mentioned in the Bible, they're often just referred to like any other animal. It's just a thing you might find in an old castle. Like, oh yeah, there's an old castle where a serpent lived, or an old castle where a dragon was known to dwell. Whereas here, once it's breathing fire, now you've upped the stakes. Yeah, 100%. And this Beowulf poem is such a key landmark example of it. One translation describes the dragon beginning to belch out flames and burn homesteads. Fire belching is probably better phrasing.

That's better. I like that. Fire belching. Fire belching is probably better phrasing. That's better. I like that. Fire belching. And it seems like it took a lot of creative invention because the fire-breathing dragon, it comes up in culture sort of separately from a bunch of existing dragons.

There was a whole separate English folklore tradition of creeping dragons, which is what we talked about St. George killing, poisonous, wingless, living in marshes, swamps, fens, a bunch of snake stuff, not comet stuff. On top of all that, there is another possible origin of a lot of our fire-breathing dragon mythology, which is volcanoes and geothermal activity of the earth. One big example in ancient Greek mythology is a being called Typhon. Typhon's body was made of coiling poisonous serpents and had fire powers. Zeus defeats Typhon in battle in mythology and imprisons Typhon under Mount Etna. Mount Etna was a fiery volcano, and so this might be an origin of saying serpents that spew fire

comes from volcanoes. That might be where we got it. There's also the legend of the Mesterstur Worm. This is a Norse legend, the Mesterstur Worm. It's about a giant sea dragon, a very serpent shaped dragon. Also, a young boy defeats it by allowing the dragon to eat him, along with a bucket of burning peat that the young boy was holding. The boy sacrifices himself, gets eaten with burning peat. That peat inside the Mesterstor worm explodes it, and its scattered remains create the highly geothermal land of Iceland. scattered remains create the highly geothermal land of Iceland. So going back to volcanic and geothermal stuff, we're also trying to use dragons for stories about that and explaining that. Yet again, there's a lot of phenomena in the world that our culture and our minds are trying to say,

how do I explain it? What's the most fun way to explain it? How about dragons? how do I explain it? What's the most fun way to explain it? How about dragons? I find it fascinating that in the past, all of those comets and asteroids, all of that was associated with dragons, whereas today, you're most likely to call it a UFO. And I think that UFOs and aliens, I mentioned it earlier, that's an example of a modern myth. Again, that's very possible that intelligent life exists somewhere in the universe. But the idea of flying saucers and alien abductions and all that, that is mythology that was built in the exact same way, where people are taking various phenomena that are real, swamp gas, whatever the other things, ball lightning, whatever, and trying to incorporate it into a narrative because that's the way the human mind works.

And that's the way human culture works. It's a series of coherent narratives that we can fit into our brain. And a lot of that information survives, not because it's true, not because it fits with any evidence, but because it's cool and interesting to think about and fun to think about. And the idea of being visited by an alien that abducts you into their spaceship, that's interesting and fun. And that is a myth, mythology that has spread around the globe since the 1940s or whatever. Everything that happens, you can start to fold into it from government secrets and government secret bases, things that do exist. But because we're not allowed to go on there and see what's there, it's like, well, I bet it's aliens. When the real answer is

actually in many cases far more interesting. But the myth survives for a reason reason because it is a thing that the brain likes to think about. Also, culture really gets infused with our way of thinking or of dreaming. wakes up, but the part of your brain that would reactivate your messages to your spinal cord and actually allow you to be fully conscious is not quite active yet. So you get this weird thing where you can kind of see the room you're in, but you can't move, but you're also hallucinating. Terrifying stuff, but it differs based on the time period and the culture on what you will see, what kind of experience you'll have with sleep paralysis. So whether it's like demons or an alien abduction, like an alien coming in your room or something like that, the kinds of the things that we will hallucinate if we're in an altered state

will change depending on our culture. So I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot of cases of people who, if they were hallucinating back in the day where dragons were kind of the it girl of the monster world, would hallucinate seeing dragons or dream about seeing these dragons. And then that just makes it feel even more real because it becomes a part of your subconscious as well as your sort of, you know, waking world. I just find it so almost sweet, like our little human fears. Like, I'm afraid of animals and I'm afraid of somebody taking my gold. It's just so basic. It's so childlike.

We're leprechauns. We're all leprechauns. Hey folks, that's the main episode for this week. I want to once again plug and celebrate the release of the new novel by our great buddy Jason Pargin. It is called Zoe is Too Drunk for This Dystopia. I didn't talk in detail about it at the beginning of the show because I want to

tell you now, it's absolutely fantastic. I have read it and enjoyed it, and it is out tomorrow in your world if you're hearing this right when this drops. Otherwise, it's out now. It's sci-fi, it's thrilling, it's also about right now, and if you have enjoyed any of Jason's appearances on podcasts like this one, I hope you will support him continuing to do that by also supporting his work as a novelist. And the bonus is you get an amazing book. So it's a pretty light lift on your end. You get an amazing book by buying it, and then you also help make this podcast and his work continue.

Beyond that, you are now in the outro of the podcast, which has fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, one theory about the origin of dragons is that they're a combination of predatory animals feared by primates, in particular snakes, jungle cats, and birds of prey. Takeaway number two, thousands of years of scientifically-minded people have attempted to document dragons, and this led to a European theory that dragons come from strangely mixed animal semen. Takeaway number three, some people have recorded comets and meteors as observations of dragons, in particular a comet before a Norse invasion of England.

And then tons more stats and numbers and stories about our human creation of dragons, drawing on everything from volcanoes to prehistoric megafauna to medicine. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we

explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the invention of Goncharov. If you don't know what that is, you're gonna love it. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of almost 14 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It is special audio. It is just for members. Thank you for being somebody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun thing, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include the book A Little History of Dragons by nonfiction writer Joyce Hargreaves, museum resources from the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History,

and tons of digital resources from English Heritage UK, the University of Iowa, and more. Also, shout out to Jason's TikTok. He is at Jason K. Pargin. He's Jason K. Pargin on all social media and Jason Pargin as the author of all his novels. That TikTok is where he explored a concept from University of Central Florida anthropology professor David Jones. This episode's page features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadigok people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy. Jason taped this on the traditional land

of the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and Sa'atso Yaha peoples. And I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join that Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 115. That's about the topic of cardboard. Fun fact,

we have modern cardboard boxes today, thanks to a specific era in men's hat making and an accident at a paper bag factory. So I recommend that episode. I recommend the new podcast Big Feats by Jason Pargin, Robert Brockway, and Sean Baby, exploring the show Mountain Monsters and so much more. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners.

I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. maximum fun a worker-owned network of artists own shows supported directly by you